Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (64 page)

Under statism, the rule of force is a corrupting influence, since it creates institutional means for legalized predation. Rand states: “If
this
is a society’s system, no power on earth can prevent men from ganging up on one another in self-defense—i.e., from forming
pressure groups
.”
⁸⁶
Pressure-group warfare was an inexorable by-product of the mixed economy.
⁸⁷
It was for this reason that Rand characterized statism as an “anti-system.” Just as statism emerged from and perpetuated the antirational and the
anti-conceptual
, so too did it constitute an “anti-system,” which militated against genuine social integration and unity. It reproduced social fragmentation on a grand scale, fostering the cult of compromise in material, spiritual, and intellectual affairs. Initially, however, the statist anti-system fragments the nation into economic groups that fight offensive and defensive political battles for their own self-preservation. The mixed economy is “an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another’s expense by an act of government—i.e., by force.”
⁸⁸

The mixed economy is “amoral” because it makes honest and just decision making irrelevant to the legislative process. No legislative decisions can be morally justified when each act of law necessarily sacrifices some groups to others.
⁸⁹
Every group, regardless of the merits of its cause, becomes “a potential threat to everyone,” holding the power, not merely to disagree, but to destroy.
⁹⁰
Each legislative action is a
by-product of predatory lobbying in which groups participate in strategic forms of communicative interaction. Social courtesies, parties, favors, threats, bribes, and blackmail consume the process. Rand insists: “If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.”
⁹¹
But Rand maintained that none of the respective groups constituted a monolithic class. Even as each social class preys on adversarial classes, the “real warfare” of the mixed economy occurs within classes, not between them. The pseudo-producers within each class prey on the genuine producers of their own class as a means to the enforcement of an unearned, stagnant economic equality. Such a process of intragroup annihilation must ultimately destroy the authentic producers, the money-makers, in all classes and professions.
⁹²

As the mixed economy careens from one crisis to another, warfare between and within pressure groups intensifies. In this social context of wild uncertainty, each group attempts to deal with perceived threats to its efficacy by relying on the state. State action provides an illusory sense of control, since in the long run, political intervention necessarily undermines the stability and efficacy of every social group and every individual.
⁹³
Rand was adamant in this regard: she maintained that
every
discernable group was affected by statist intervention, not just every economic interest.
Every
differentiating characteristic among human beings becomes a tool for pressure-group jockeying: age, sex, sexual orientation, social status, religion, nationality, and race. Statism splinters society “into warring tribes.”
⁹⁴
The statist legal machinery pits “ethnic minorities against the majority, the young against the old, the old against the middle, women against men, welfare-recipient against the self-supporting.”
⁹⁵

RACISM

In Rand’s view, racism is the most vicious form of social fragmentation perpetuated by modern statism. Racism is not a mere by-product of state intervention; it is a constituent element of statism.

Rand’s critique of racism is a good illustration of her three-level analysis. On Level 1, she examined racism in terms of its psycho-epistemological and
ethical
implications. On Level 2, she explored the linguistic and conceptual subversion that institutional racism requires. On Level 3, she linked her discussion to the broader, structural context of contemporary statism. Each level is a precondition and reciprocal implication of the other.

Nathaniel Branden claims that despite Rand’s antagonism toward
racism
, she was reluctant to write on the subject because it had been monopolized by the left. But Branden (1989, 335) persuaded Rand to contribute her first essay
on racism
in the September 1963 issue of
The Objectivist Newsletter.
Rand argued initially from a psycho-epistemological and ethical standpoint. She wrote: “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” It negated the uniqueness of the individual, his reason, choice, and values by “ascribing moral, social or political significance” to his “genetic lineage.” It judged each individual solely on the basis of “his internal body chemistry … not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.” Psychologically, it emerged from the “racist’s sense of his own inferiority.” It was “a quest for the unearned,” “a quest for automatic knowledge,” and “a quest for
an automatic self-esteem
(or pseudo-self-esteem).” In evaluating people by a racial criterion, racists attempt to by-pass the need to rationally judge the facts of a person’s character. They seek moral distinction not in their own actions, but in the actions and beliefs of their forebears.
⁹⁶
They struggle “to induce
racial
guilt,” by punishing people for the sins—real or illusory—committed by their ancestors.
⁹⁷

The racist has an associational, perceptual psycho-epistemology that stores concrete memories and emotional estimates of isolated incidences. Such a mentality is incapable of thinking in terms of principles or abstractions (Rand, quoted in B. Branden 1962T, lecture 6). Racism, in all of its forms, was a “manifestation of the
anti-conceptual
mentality.” The fear of foreigners (xenophobia), the group loyalty of the guild, the ancestor worship of the family, the blood ties of the criminal gang, and the chauvinism of the nationalist were all examples of anti-conceptual tribalism. Tribalism was “a reciprocally reinforcing cause and result” of the various caste systems throughout history.
⁹⁸

Rand argued: “Philosophically, tribalism is the product of irrationalism and collectivism.” Though some people denigrate the efficacy of reason, they cannot dispense with the need for a comprehensive view of their own existence. They cannot dispense with the need for self-efficacy and self-worth. Such people will seek an illusory efficacy and worth by latching on to any group that provides them with a frame of reference. The group seems to possess a kind of “knowledge” the individual lacks, a “knowledge” acquired by an effort-less, ineffable process. People find that the easiest group to join is that to which they belong by virtue of birth—their
race
.
⁹⁹

Moving toward Level 2 of her analysis, Rand recognized that the individual’s awareness of himself in
racial
terms was not always a cause for concern in the multicultural, contemporary society. Rand did not object to
the need of individuals to take pleasure in their familial or ancestral backgrounds. Commenting on
Alex Haley’s
Roots
, for instance, Rand (1977T) recognized that African Americans had been robbed of a historical past. Having been tom forcibly from their culture, they needed to project “moral heroes.” Haley’s book, in Rand’s view, created a useful mythology, an exalted, “enormously compelling and very beautiful” image of how people in despair could preserve their human dignity.

What Rand objected to was the practice of those who sought to substitute their lineage for an authentic self-esteem. Self-efficacy and self-worth cannot be derived from others—past or present. In the twentieth century, the most notorious—and murderous—practitioners of such racial worship were the Nazis.
Nazi
ideology had obliterated the core of individualism by ascribing notions of good and evil to whole groups of people based upon their alleged blood ties (Peikoff 1982). Following Rand, Peikoff argued that
nationalism
was in essence a form of tribalism and
racism
. It was not a rationally patriotic loyalty to the principles on which a country was based. Rather, it extolled and defended the Volk, the nation, on the grounds of racial purity.
¹⁰⁰

Rand recognized that contemporary racist doctrines were frequently disguised as celebrations of “
ethnicity
.” In Rand’s view, “ethnicity” was an
anti-concept
that concealed the individual’s racism. The advocates of “ethnicity” conform to their ethnic groups’ traditions. They see language not as a conceptual tool but as “a mystic heritage.” Their “hysterical loyalty” to subtle differences of dialect and ritual provide them with an illusory sense of self-esteem derived from the blood collective to which they belong.
¹⁰¹

Such tribalism had engulfed Europe for centuries. Rand argued that in such a tribalist atmosphere, not even collectivistic Marxism could succeed. For Rand, Marxism was false and corrupt, but “clean” in comparison to the tribalist anti-conceptual mentality:

Marxism is an
intellectual
construct; it is false, but it is an
abstract
theory—and
it is too abstract for the tribalists’ concrete-bound, perceptual mentalities.
It requires a significantly high level of
abstraction
to grasp the reality of “an
international
working class”—a level beyond the power of a consciousness that understands its own village, but has trouble treating the nearest town as fully real. (126)

Such ethnic tribalism seriously undermined the Soviets’ attempts to establish a communist hegemony.
¹⁰²

Perhaps it was Rand’s experiences in the Soviet Union that influenced her hostility toward quotas. Though Rand benefited from the abolition of
educational restrictions on Jews and women students, she bore witness to the reinstatement of quotas by the Bolshevik regime. Just as the czars had practiced institutional
racism
, the Bolsheviks attempted to boost the participation of “proletarian” students through open admissions, relaxed educational standards, and a mass purge of “bourgeois” scholars and pupils. Unqualified students were advanced on the basis of their proletarian background. It was this experience perhaps that led Rand to see all “
affirmative
action” programs as humiliating and degrading to the individual’s talents and abilities.

Indeed, for Rand, the notion of “affirmative action,” was but another
anti-concept
to hide the reinstitutionalization of
race
as a criterion of judgment. Quotas embodied an internal contradiction. They attempted to use racism in order to combat racism. They categorized all members of a given racial group as identical. This stereotyped collectivization of all minority group members was achieved first in the eyes of those who did not gain from quotas and who resented the beneficiaries. But even those who benefited from quotas were humiliated by the stigma of helplessness and victimization.
¹⁰³

The imposition of quotas by the state could only inspire more “blind, interracial hatred.”
¹⁰⁴
Just as the state’s financial inflation caused the debasement of the currency, so too did the state’s “moral inflation” cause the debasement of genuine morality. By multiplying countless forms of injustice, in the name of justice, the state ultimately enriched itself and its dependents (312). Rand argued that racism could not, therefore, be explained on the sole basis of the tribalists’ psycho-epistemology or on the basis of ideological utility. Racists had a vested interest in their biases (Rand, quoted in B. Branden 1962T, lecture 6). Moving toward Level 3 of her analysis, Rand recognized that tribalism, irrationalism, and collectivism had been present throughout history. She sought to explain their rebirth in the modern era, their historically specific manifestations in contemporary
statism
.

Rand argued that the relationship between statism and tribalism was reciprocal. The tribal premise was the ideological and existential root of statism. Statism had arisen out of “prehistorical tribal warfare.” Once established, it institutionalized its own racist subcategories and castes in order to sustain its rule.
¹⁰⁵
The perpetuation of racial hatred provided the state with a necessary tool for its political domination. Statists frequently scapegoated racial and ethnic groups in order to deflect popular disaffection with deteriorating social conditions.
¹⁰⁶
But if tribalism was a precondition of statism, statism was a reciprocally related cause. Racism had to be implemented politically before it could engulf an entire society: “The political cause of tribalism’s rebirth is the
mixed economy
—the transitional
stage of the formerly civilized countries of the West on their way to the political level from which the rest of the world has never emerged: the level of permanent tribal warfare” (123).

In Rand’s view, the mixed economy had splintered the country into warring pressure groups. Under such conditions of social fragmentation, any individual who lacks a group affiliation is put at a disadvantage in the political process. Since race is the simplest category of collective association, most individuals are driven to racial identification out of self-defense. Just as the mixed economy manufactured pressure groups, so too did it manufacture racism.
¹⁰⁷

And just as the domestic mixed economy made racism inevitable, so too did the global spread of statism. Rand saw the world fracturing into hostile ethnic tribes with each group aiming to destroy its ethnic rivals in primitive conflicts over cultural, religious, and linguistic differences. Rand called the process one of “global balkanization.” In 1977, in a statement of prophetic significance, she observed that the situation in Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia was symptomatic of the larger, global trend. The “Balkan tribes … never vanished,” Rand wrote, “they have been popping up in minor explosions all along, and a major one is possible at any time.”
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